27 November 2012 5:34 PM

Look, I really don’t mind
Stephen Fry. There are those who say he is a bumptious, oily, overblown,
pompous, preening, under-powered pile of steaming self-regard, and overly
sensitive to the mildest criticism with it.

But I say,
you can’t keep a good man down.

In
particular, Mr Fry has gone down on record attacking the country’s overbearing
libel laws as a threat to free speech, and it is rare to find celebrities who
don’t want to shut down all media from The Times to Twitter that are beyond the
control of their PR agents.

Sometimes, however,
he can’t help making a big noise, and sometimes that noise turns out to be bad
for public relations.

There was
the Pope, for example. When Benedict turned up on a state visit a couple of
years ago, Mr Fry signed a letter to the Guardian which took the general line
of ‘Pope Go Home’, although it did say he was welcome to come as a private
citizen.

The response was
that very large crowds turned out for the visit and Benedict’s open air
services, and the affair was reckoned a major success on all sides. Mr Fry let
it be known that he was wounded when some didn’t like his contribution.

Stephen, you
must prepare to be wounded again.

This time, it’s
the cuts. You will be aware, if you listen to the BBC, that deep and divisive
cuts to public spending are wrecking vital public sector services, throwing
millions on the dole, and driving more millions into poverty and homelessness.
Who could doubt it?

The worst cuts,
we now learn, thanks to Mr Fry, are striking at the very heart of our cultural
life.

Mr Fry and some
of his pals are worried about the plans of the Department of Culture, Media and
Sport to cut the Arts Council’s grant from £452 million to £350 million by
2014/15. Here is Mr Fry on the subject, quoted in the London Evening Standard:
‘Whatever your politics, you can’t believe that art has to take a stand in the
marketplace like potatoes or knives and forks or any other industrial thing.’

National Theatre
director Sir Nicholas Hytner chipped in by condemning the ‘madness’ of cutting
‘a corner of the creative economy for the sake of tiny savings that would be
vastly outweighed by the resultant losses.’

And then there
was Danny Boyle, who said the true legacy of his Olympic opening ceremony
should be recognition of the arts and we have to understand where our growth
comes from in ‘a modern economy that doesn’t make cars any more’.

I hate to
risk going beyond the bounds of legitimate politics as set by Stephen Fry. It
makes me feel like a UKIP voter in Rotherham.

But
Britain made 1,343,810 motor vehicles last year, and
production is expected to rise by a further 800,000 over the next four years.

I am puzzled by Sir Nicholas’ warning that if we cut arts subsidies we
will lose vast amounts of profit. If vast sums of money were really to be made,
wouldn’t it be the case that very rich people, like, for example, Sir Nicholas,
might be willing to take a punt and put up a bob or two of their own?

We
are regularly told that we have to put lots of public money into the theatre because
so many people go. Last month some theatrical bigwig called Rachel
Tackley was at it, saying that at 30 million a year theatregoing outstrips
football attendances.

Given this enormous success, we might ask why the theatre needs subsidising.
Why is it our duty to pay for the pleasures of theatregoers? Last time I
looked, theatre tickets weren’t cheap, so what happens to the box office money
from all those big audiences, and why can’t the theatres run themselves just
like football clubs do?

Why can’t
all those theatres pulling in big money with tacky shows be asked to use their
own resources to subsidise Sir Nicholas’ efforts at the National?

Sir
Nicholas, by the way, cut his theatrical teeth working in opera. Opera is very,
very, very expensive, and very, very, very heavily state subsidised. It
attracts among its audiences few of the lower and middle income people who do
the bulk of the paying with their taxes and their lottery tickets.

I do
not think it unreasonable to ask the well-padded patrons who make up opera
audiences to pay an economic price for their tickets.

The
same sort of people do not blink at paying £400 a pop for the unsubsidised
Rolling Stones, even though Mick Jagger has stopped singing that song about the
15-year-old whose ID he doesn’t want, which seems to have become so
unfashionable these days.

The
arts have been over-subsidised since the 1960s, when Harold Wilson’s government
was persuaded by a powerful lawyer called Arnold Goodman to throw cash at the
luvvies while draining state money from sport. The result has been childhood
and adult obesity and ill-health, and increased crime and disorder among young
people, who stubbornly refuse to go to the opera. Modest sports subsidies
introduced in recent years at a level far below that lavished on the arts
seemed to win national approval during the Olympics.

Who
did most to make the Olympics a success? Mo Farah, Katherine Grainger, Bradley
Wiggins? Or Danny ‘satanic mills’ Boyle?

The
difference between Stephen Fry’s subsidised arts and a potato is that I can
choose whether to buy the potato. And a potato is more useful than Danny Boyle.

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21 November 2012 6:18 PM

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has admitted that, when it comes to the Church of England’s arguments over women bishops, ‘a great deal of this discussion is not intelligible to our wider society.’

No one has ever accused the Archbishop of having a knack for a pithy phrase. So let’s try to grasp the scale of the great ocean of blank incomprehension that separates the warring representatives of the CofE’s shrinking constituency from the rest of the planet.

It is not that the great majority of people are wondering exactly how and why the Church seems to be trying to eat itself to death. They are watching the writhings of the Church – which as far as we can tell may amount to a death agony – with the sort of interest they might give to a small conflict in Asia.

The struggles are very sad for those involved, of course, and one feels sorry for the innocent victims, but it is all a long way away and the passions of the partipants are not ours, nor can we understand them. We have to get up and go to work in the morning.

For those that do have any interest in how this ecclesiastical catastrophe came about, it is necessary to know just two things. The troubles that brought about the disastrous Synod vote and the humilation of the Church’s leadership did not just happen this week. They have been building up for decades.

The second thing is that, as a result of those troubles, the various Anglican factions have no trust in each other at all.

Among these factions are the Anglo-Catholics, the ‘smells and bells’ group who hanker for Rome and whose inspiration comes from the High Church movement of the 19th century.

They oppose women bishops because there have never been women bishops and the Roman Catholic church doesn’t have them. They are prone to making threats to quit for Rome should the cause of women succeed in the CofE. But few ever do so, and you do not need to be horribly cynical to believe this is connected to the well-funded churches, stipends and pensions offered by the Church of England.

Anglo-Catholicism is undoubtedly in decline and its influence is less than in past years.

The force now is with the conservative evangelicals. They are the descendants of the protestants of the Reformation, and have some beliefs in common with the ‘happy clappy’ movement which produced the new Archbishop of Canterbury, the Rt Revd Justin Welby.

They have successful churches with growing congregations. They believe in the Bible. They don’t want women priests or bishops because the Bible doesn’t have them.

They have, however, an almost total lack of connection with conservative thinking in the secular world. Evangelicals will say the Bible shows that women are not fitted for leadership. Secular conservatives will answer with a two-word question. Margaret Thatcher?

It is fashionable in the wake of the Synod vote to blame the nasty evangelicals and their mule-headed blocking of progress. Perhaps, though, no one is looking closely enough at the liberals, who have dominated the inner councils of the Church since the 1980s.

Evelyn Waugh pinned down one of the tendencies among this bunch as early as the 1920s.

‘There is a species of person called a 'Modern Churchman' who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to any religious belief’, he wrote.

Since Waugh’s observations in Decline and Fall, the only change has been that the Modern Churchmen’s Union has changed its name to Modern Churchpeople’s Union and now to Modern Church.

A distinguishing feature of the liberals is what you might call WAAGism. The economy has collapsed? We Are All Guilty. Family breakdown has reached record levels? WAAG. Demonstrators outside St Pauls? Tottenham lose horribly at Arsenal? You get the picture.

Since the liberals tend to be intellectuals and academics, they have a lot of long words and sentences with which to say WAAG. For example, earlier this year one bishop notably blamed the summer 2011 riots on the poverty and dullness of the rioters’ lives. This was the fault of everyone who had failed to give the rioters exciting jobs, nice cars, and things to do. This was, the prelate in question said, a ‘structural sin’ on the part of the rest of us.

Altogether now: WAAG!

Liberals are terribly patronising to Anglo-Catholics and hold their noses in the presence of conservative evangelicals. They have no regard for anyone backward enough to oppose women bishops and they cannot stomach people who don’t like the idea of gay priests.

Because of their effective grip on the levers of power in the Church, there have been few Anglo-Catholic bishops in recent decades and currently no senior figure at all picked from among the hardline conservative evangelicals. The lack of promotion for traditionalists has bred resentment and mistrust. Traditionalists think they are held in contempt and believe the liberals want to oust them entirely from the CofE.

So when, at the Synod, the bishops really needed co-operation from the minority factions, they didn’t get it.

Liberals like to mock the figure of Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury who retired in 2002, and whose sympathies lay generally with the evangelical movement. Carey, they joke, was dull, slow and incapable of keeping up with events and thinking.

But George Carey got the CofE to accept women priests, and held the Church of England and the worldwide Anglican Communion together for a decade despite terrible divisions.

How Rowan Williams must wish he had achieved the same success as Lord Carey.

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13 November 2012 7:09 PM

I do not as a
rule speak up in favour of Sinn Fein, the Peace Pledge Union, the myriad
factions of the far left, nor drunken teenagers having a laugh on whatever
social media is in fashion this week.

But I think it’s
worth a word with Kent Police over the arrest of Linford House, a 19-year-old
who burned a remembrance poppy on Facebook, seemingly adding an unfriendly
message directed at ‘squadeys’.

Mr House may
have missed out on some of the finer points of the education system, but that
wasn’t the reason he spent a night in custody. He was being questioned over a
possible offence under the Malicious Communications Act of 2003, which can mean
six months in jail.

The Malicious
Communications Act turns out to be one of those laws which have turned up by
the dozen over the past 15 years or so, making it a serious crime to give
offence, even if no-one is actually offended.

It may be that
the Kent Police officers behind this arrest are as badly educated as Mr House,
or perhaps they are just thick, or it could be that they like the idea of
marching up and down in jackboots nicking people on the grounds that they don’t
like the look of them.

They certainly
have no history. If they did they would know that opposition to the poppy dates
from the pacifist movement of the 1930s, and that even during the darkest days
of World War Two pacifist agitators against the war were spared jail.

Some might suggest
that freedom to demonstrate against the poppy is one of the things that so many
died for in the wars of the past 100 years, alongside other unfashionable
qualities like freedom of the press. The motives of those who do so may be
deplorable, manipulative or irresponsible. But it don’t change the fact that in
a free country, such as the one we like to think we live in, you are allowed to
dissent.

My hope is that
the chief constable of Kent Police, Ian Learmonth, will rapidly come to realise
that a mistake has been made and take steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
I wouldn’t want to put any faith in the good sense of the Crown Prosecution
Service if it comes to a decision on whether or not to take Mr House to court.

For the rest of
us, it is time to stop poppy creep.

The process that
has led to weeks of compulsory poppy-wearing began 40 years ago or so, when
Whitehall was certain that as the veterans of the world wars died, interest in
commemorating the sacrifice of two generations would wither away. It didn’t,
and there was a public reaction to the obvious official lack of enthusiasm that
made a lot of people determined to continue the remembrance tradition.

Now you get
every twopenny celebrity and football pundit wearing poppies on TV from
mid-October. Are they really mindful of the sufferings of their grandparents
and great grandparents, or do the producers make them?

It would be less
tacky, more likely to provoke thought and altogether more moving if remembrance
were restricted to just one Poppy Day, as the Great War generation arranged it
in the 1920s. Everything would stop for two minutes at 11 o’clock on 11
November. The event would have real impact.

As it is the
poppy festival is turning into one more of the autumn’s bad taste commercial
events, complete with bumper poppies and jewelled poppies for the show-off
element.

It now coincides
with Halloween, a low-grade imported excuse for selling pumpkins and overpriced
kiddie costumes, which I suspect bores even the children dragged out to harass
their neighbours. A lot of unlikely things happen in the world, but how in hell
did this one catch on in an age of paedophile scares and CRB checks?

Poppies also
come with the season of the grand communal bonfire, the organised misery that
has replaced what used to be known as Bonfire Night. You dress the children up
warm, park on a grass verge a mile and a half from the festivities if you are
lucky, spend £50 on entrance money and fairground rides, and watch some firm
set off the same firework display as you can see anywhere else any weekend of
the year.

What happened to
your own bonfire, perhaps with the neighbours around, and parkin, a kind of
cake you would eat at no other time of the year? These days having your own
fireworks is pretty close to ASBO behaviour, and the jumping jacks and
bangers that were once the small change of any good bonfire are long gone.

You will always
hear about the terrible toll in burns and injuries the old Bonfire Night use to
bring. The only thing is, these injuries always happened to other people, never
to anyone you actually knew. The abolition of Bonfire Night was the first
triumph of the modern ‘elf and safety industry.

Guy Fawkes night
was charming, the more so because of its historic roots. An England that could
base a national celebration around burning the effigy of a Catholic rebel was
pretty confident that it no longer had any real sectarian divisions.

Nowadays there
are places you can’t celebrate Christmas because the management worries about
who it might offend.

Mind you,
there’s a case for strict limits on Christmas too. I’d like Marks and Spencer
to know what a fool I felt in mid-October when I walked into a coffee shop with
a couple of new shirts in one of their freshly-issued festive carrier bags. And
Happy New Year, as the girls behind the counter put it.

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02 November 2012 7:14 PM

It is hard to find much to be cheerful about in these bleak autumn days, so we must applaud the efforts of those people willing to make fools of themselves in the cause of the gaiety of the nation.

So a round for Peter Herbert of the Society of Black Lawyers, who complained about mysteriously undefined language allegedly used by a referee in a football match at Chelsea, even though he wasn’t there and doesn’t know any more than he read in the newspapers.

And another one for the Metropolitan Police, who are taking him seriously, and seem to be ready to launch a vigorous investigation into this alleged hate crime, whatever it might have been.

Mr Herbert has demonstrated over many years that he does not like to let a racial slur go without a complaint. I hope the chess authorities have their lawyers ready, because they must think of Mr Herbert’s fury and the expense of the subsequent police investigation should he discover that white always goes first.

Then there is Ronnie Wood, who demonstrated his dedication to selling Rolling Stones tickets/films/tee shirts/CDs/the rest by offering to marry his girlfriend, theatre producer Sally Humphreys. Miss Humphreys, at 34, is 31 years the junior of her fiancé.

The measure of this match is that the last time the Rolling Stones made a good record Miss Humphreys was still some years short of being born.

However my award for the most determined attempt to cheer us all up goes to David Gauke, again.

You may remember that back in the summer Mr Gauke, a Treasury minister, had some stern words to describe the immoral behaviour of those who try to avoid the attention of the taxman by paying tradesmen in cash.

Now he’s onto the subject of universal benefits, and the concerns of middle class families who are about to lose one of them. To complain about cuts to Child Benefit, which is worth £1,752 a year for a couple with two children, is ‘financial nimbyism’.

Mr Gauke went on to explain that ‘we all have to live within our means’ and that ‘every section of society is having to make a contribution.’

There are a couple of red light words here before you start to examine Mr Gauke’s argument.

A nimby is someone who objects to having their living standards diminished by a new housing estate or a wind farm on their doorstep, when they should accept that development is vital for the national interest, or at least the interest of someone in Whitehall who needs to hit their targets.

A financial nimby appears to be someone who objects to having their money taken away by Mr Gauke.

Contribution is the word habitually used by Liberal Democrats whenever they want to take more of your money to pay for aid for African dictators or more wind farms. It has that authentically offensive tone which suggests that it is morally wrong for you to disagree.

If you look at what happens with Child Benefit, it is possible to think that there are some people in this affair who will not be making a contribution.

To pay your Child Benefit, first the Government takes your money and then it gives it back to you, minus a little bit to pay the civil servants who check the forms and do the sums.

But under the Child Benefit reforms, you will now have the option of getting your benefit, and then have the taxman take it away again at the end of the year.

So it works like this: the taxman takes your money. Then he gives it back to you. Then he takes it away again.

It all makes work for the working man to do. And in this case the lucky civil servants pointlessly shuffling the forms around are working for Mr Gauke, who has ‘strategic oversight’ of the tax system.

Mr Gauke, of course, has in the past demonstrated the extent of his personal commitment to making a contribution. He is by profession a lawyer, who worked for a firm with a profitable line in tax efficiency advice.

The Parliamentary expenses disclosures showed that he charged £10,248.32 to cover payments for his second home. This included £8,550 for stamp duty when he moved house.

All this nonsense is going on before you start to consider the wisdom of turning Child Benefit into another means-tested handout.

The Treasury has never seen a means test it didn’t like. But out here in the rest of the world, we see that means tested benefits encourage dependency over work and reckless spending over thrift, and that the vast scale of the benefit state has long cost the rest of us far more than we can afford.

Some ministers know that means tested benefits are the last thing to persuade people to live within their means. They are struggling to bring in benefit reforms accordingly. Mr Gauke, it seems, is not with them.

What he is really saying is this: we all have to live within your means.